On Saturday, August 16, twenty-two members of the cartooning community will descend upon Meltdown Comics on Sunset Boulevard to sign copies of Dark Horse Comics’ recently released book “The Sakai Project” to help raise money for the medical bills of fellow cartoonist Stan Sakai, creator of Dark Horse’s “Usagi Yojimbo” comic book, now in its thirtieth year.

Fundraising efforts were initially spearheaded by the Comic Art Professional Society (CAPS), an organization of professional comic book artists and writers of which Stan Sakai is a member. Organized by artist Tone Rodriguez, CAPS began collecting original art last December for an online auction to lend a helping hand to Sakai, whose wife Sharon has been suffering from an inoperable brain tumor. As art poured in from the cartooning community, many pieces were custom drawings of Stan’s samurai rabbit creation Usagi Yojimbo.

Bill Morrison, a member of CAPS and an art director at Bongo Comics (publisher of “The Simpsons”), approached Sakai’s publisher, Dark Horse, about collecting these wonderful images into a book to also benefit the Sakais. Dark Horse publisher Mike Richardson was enthusiastic about the idea, and offered to pay for the book’s publication so that all sales could go to the Sakais. Bill Morrison proceeded to volunteer his time to edit the book in tandem with Dark Horse editor Randy Stradley which was designed voluntarily by noted book designer Serban Cristescu. The result is a beautiful 160-paged hardcover art book featuring interpretations of Usagi Yojimbo by some of the top cartoonists in comics today.

Between the online auction and the book, the cartooning community came together in a unique way to help one of their own. Now twenty-one artists local to Los Angeles will gather one more time to help their friend with a fundraising book signing event.

Books will be sold for $45 each, or if fans already have the book, they will be charged a nominal $15 to have their books signed by the artists in attendance.

In addition to “The Sakai Project” book, there will be limited edition prints available exclusively at the event of four images from the book by artists attending the signing: Sergio Aragonès, Stan Sakai, William Stout, and Bill Morrison.

The event will take place on August 16 from 4-6pm at Meltdown Comics & Collectibles, 7522 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90046. Thanks to Meltdown, all proceeds go to Sharon & Stan Sakai to help with their medical bills.

Hear from three of the top web comic creators and how they make money from their own creations. Jason Brubaker, Jorge Cham, and Ethan Nicolle appear at Gallery Nucleus on Saturday March 1st for an afternoon workshop which will then be followed by a Q&A and signing.

Jason Brubaker works at Dreamworks Animation in Visual Development. At night, he puts on his cape and doubles as an independent graphic novelist and self-publisher. Jason has worked on Kung-Fu Panda 2, Ghost Rider, Van Helsing, Blade II, Leap of Faith, Roswell, Pitch Black, Blade and more as a visual development and storyboard artist. Jason has self-published two of his own graphic novels based on his story Remind. He’s raised over $125,000 through Kickstarter to self-publish Remind in two volumes. Jason continues to create new stories and just put out a book called Unnatural Talents which is about self publishing your own graphic novel.

Jorge Cham is the creator of “Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD),” the comic strip about life (or the lack thereof) in Academia. Often called “the Dilbert of Academia,” PHD has appeared in the Stanford, MIT, Caltech and Carnegie Mellon newspapers, among others, and is published online where it receives over nine million page views a month from over 1000 universities and colleges worldwide. He obtained his B.S. from Georgia Tech and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, specializing in Robotics. He was sub-sequently,an Instructor and Research Associate at Caltech from 2003-2005, where his work focused on developing “Smart” Neural Implants. He travels and presents all over the world to thousands of graduate students, faculty and administrators on the graduate student experience. Four PHD book collections have been published with over 55,000 copies sold. He has over 200,000 fans on Facebook!

Ethan Nicolle is an American comic book creator, artist, and writer. He created the Slave Labor Graphics comic Chumble Spuzz which has been released as two graphic novels. He also worked with his younger brother, Malachai, to create Axe Cop, the web comic phenomena that has nearly 35,000 fans on Facebook and an animated show on Fox’s Television’s ADHD. Ethan has also created another popular webcomic called Bearmageddon that is about an end of the world apocalypse story with mutant bears, He also have had various pitches optioned by Cartoon Network, and works on the Axe Cop TV show at FOX and is currently writing for DreamWorks Animation on the new Veggie Tales series.